The activist and former political prisoner Silverio Portal documented in a reel published on Facebook how recruits from the Active Military Service collect trash in the streets of Havana, an image that Portal himself described as an expression of "67 years of socialist failure."
The recording shows uniformed youths performing urban sanitation tasks in the Cuban capital, a practice that the regime has normalized in light of the collapse of the waste collection system.
"This is lost," Portal stated while referring to the regime's makeshift solutions to the problems faced by the population. "This has fallen into an abyss," he emphasized.
It's not the first time: in October 2025, the government had already resorted to recruits to alleviate the same crisis.
The dimension of the problem is structural. Havana generates between 24,000 and 30,000 cubic meters of waste daily, but only 44 out of 106 collection trucks are operational due to a lack of diesel and mechanical deterioration.
Up to 23,814 cubic meters daily accumulate without being collected, according to data from 2026. The city needs between 20,000 and 30,000 containers, but it only has 10,000.
The garbage crisis in Havana made headlines in the international press in February 2026, with coverage from the New York Times.
The regime has responded with operations that do not address the underlying issue.
The so-called "Operation Clean-Up," carried out between October and November 2025, mobilized soldiers, recruits, police officers, and state workers, and collected 396,157 cubic meters in 20 days, according to Governor Yanet Hernández Pérez.
It also announced a plan of 49 measures that includes the importation of containers, yet none of the initiatives have addressed the chronic accumulation of waste.
The use of recruits for these tasks highlights another facet of the Cuban Mandatory Military Service: young people are employed as unskilled labor without any legal option to refuse, as the regime does not recognize the right to conscientious objection.
Those who refuse to fulfill the service face fines or imprisonment.
The conditions within the SMO are also a cause for concern. At least 67 recruits died between 2018 and early 2026, primarily due to suicides and negligence.
In February of this year, Abraham Limonta Estrada, 17 years old, took his own life at the "La Marquesita" Military Unit in Guantánamo, just three months after joining the service.
Portal has been documenting the urban degradation of Havana for years under the hashtag #cubaedtadofallido. In April 2026, he reported extreme unsanitary conditions in a building on Dragones Street at the corner of Águila, in Central Havana.
Earlier, in May 2022, he protested sitting in a huge puddle filled with water, holding a sign that summed up the situation: "We are drowning in garbage."
While the regime presents recruits with rhetoric of "energy, commitment, and youth," mountains of garbage continue to block intersections in Centro Habana and the Cuban capital accumulates waste without any mobilization campaign having managed to reverse the structural collapse of sanitation.
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